'Watchmen' Episode Two Makes Us Question Our Perspective of Good and Evil
This week, the far right response to HBO's Watchmen was swift and baffling. Online trolls were outraged that Damon Lindelof's new series delved into politics and the deeply rooted racism in America. They were also mad that white supremacists co-opted the likeness of Rorschach. But Rorschach is my favorite superhero!, fans argued. What they failed to realize is that, though he's the protagonist of the original comics, Rorschach was never meant to be a hero (in fact, Alan Moore found it laughable and terrifying that people thought of the masked vigilante as a good guy). When I spoke with Lindelof a few weeks ago about this misunderstanding of the original comics, he noted that "good guys and bad guys are not really even part of the vernacular here.”
And so, in its second episode, HBO's Watchmen makes clear that there are no good guys and bad guys in this story. The episode opens back in WWI, where a German woman is called upon to write a propaganda flyer to be dropped on American soldiers. "What is Democracy?" the flyer asks. "Do you enjoy the same rights as the white people in America? Or are you treated over there as second class citizens?" This was actually a real tactic used by Germans during the first and second world wars. And the use here in the opening to this episode connects to an interesting theme in this story. Good and evil is a matter of perspective.
One of these flyers, we see, is picked up by Will Reeves's father, where it makes its way back to America. It becomes the sheet of paper upon which he writes the "Watch Over This Boy" note while fleeing the Tulsa Race Massacre. This shows an important perspective of this show—that the institutionalized racism in America is horrible and wide-reaching throughout history. It is poisonous throughout generations. It is not something we can forget about, it's not something that has been solved, it's not something that can be ignored. So, we must ask ourselves, are Americans—capable of atrocities like the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921—truly good? What is good and what is evil?
This theme is addressed throughout Episode Two. In one interesting scene we see the initial reaction to the murder of Chief Judd Crawford. The police storm a trailer park—known as Nixonville—where they believe most of the white supremacists reside. They unconstitutionally raid the homes of these individuals, they assault them, they judge them guilty before proving them innocent. We even see our protagonist Angela Abar lose her composure and beat the shit out of one man who attempts to attack her.
Then, of course, there's the KKK outfit in Crawford's closet. He was Abar's close friend. He was the chief of police. He was by all accounts a good man. But, those Klan robes in his closet prove otherwise. Along with the audience, Angela must completely reconsider who she believed was good and who was evil. This obviously must make us reconsider what we think of Will Reeves, too, who claims to have murdered Crawford. What we learn in this episode is that he is Angela's grandfather. We also know that if he did, indeed, somehow kill Crawford, he likely did so because the chief of police was a white supremacist.
Episode Two also helps fill in some of the backstory of this world. We finally see what happened to Angela that caused her to leave the police force and hide her identity while fighting crime. It was an incident known as The White Night, when members of the Seventh Kalvalry massacred a number of known cops. Angela survived, but many, including the parents of the children she adopted, were murdered. This was the event that caused the police to hide their faces. We also learn a little bit more about the nature of Redfordations, which is money given to ancestors of those whose lives were destroyed during the violent, racist Tulsa Massacre. The episode also provides a brief glimpse into the supposed origin of Hooded Justice, the legendary figure who kicked off the masked vigilante trend in the late 1930s. Hooded Justice's identity was never revealed, but speculation that appeared in the original Watchmen comics supposedly identified him as circus strongman Rolf Muller. In a made for TV special in Episode Two, the program runs with this theory, opening with a recreation of the discovery of Rolf's body washed up on the coast of Boston. In the comics and auxiliary materials of Watchmen, it is speculated that Muller was a Nazi sympathizer and also possibly a serial killer, throwing into question the ethical origins of the entire masked vigilante movement.
Between the flashback opening, the big Crawford reveal, the mystery surrounding Will Reeves, and the police response to the chief's murder—in one hour, our whole perception of good and evil in this Watchmen universe has been flipped. Those we thought of as heroes were capable of great evil. Those we thought had committed crimes might have been acting somewhat ethically. That's exactly the moral grey area that Moore's original source material occupies. And prepare for more debates, more outrage, and more backlash to this story going forward. Like the real world, nothing is clear cut, and nothing is easy.
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